This Friday’s song is Little Red Corvette by Prince. When this song was released in 1982, I was living in Houston, Texas. Houston was growing rapidly at the time and it was an incredible place to live. There was a dance club called Johnny B. Dalton’s located on 1960 that my friends and I hung out at. It was still a country music club in 1982, but they shifted to this style of pop music and put in an amazing light system a few years later. I think the “brand” is still being used by a dance club in Conroe, Texas today.
I was developing business applications for the field service group of the Digital Systems Group (DSG) at Texas Instruments. This was also a rapidly changing time in the technology industry. Microcomputers, led by the IBM PC, provided an amazing new computing platform that fundamentally changed the shape of the industry. Several of the people that I worked with from this team at TI helped create Compaq which brought the first “portable” PC to market and hit $100 million in revenue in their second year. It was a heady time to be in tech.